Blame our faulty brains. Luckily, there are ways to get out of the most common mental traps.
Until there’s a safe and widespread vaccine rollout, the greatest weapons we have against the pandemic are the decisions we make every day. The bad news about this is that humans are notoriously lousy decision-makers.
Why, though? Blame our faulty brains: All of us possess cognitive biases that make it difficult to think rationally when faced with questions involving risk. Should we dine at a restaurant? Is it a good idea to send our kids back to school? Can we safely visit our folks to celebrate Thanksgiving?
While our instincts may be to go with the less-than-optimal choice, we’re not…
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I recently moved apartments and one of the most fun parts of this has to be countless Ikea runs followed by evenings and weekends of assembling furniture. If you live in the West, you’ll probably relate to my experience, as well. What makes these Ikea runs so fun and why do we love our Ikea furniture so much?
One possible reason is that the effort we put into assembling our furniture leads to an overvaluation of the final product. In 2012, Michael Norton, a researcher at the Harvard Business School, along with his colleagues, coined the term ‘Ikea Effect’ to…
This December, I was offered the chance to write for Medium’s Writing Pilot Program. It’s has been a fun and educational journey, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the challenges and lessons I have experienced so far. I hope these tips and thoughts can help other up-and-coming or part-time writers like me who share my experiences.
1. Start observing things in your daily life with more scrutiny
This article is a more digestible summary of a chapter from the book ‘Character Strength Development: Perspectives from Positive Psychology’ I co-authored this chapter along with Prof. Salome Divya Vijaykumar, Ranjitha Kumar, Avneet Kaur, Vibha Bhat, and Ritu Verma.
“In the face of failure and threat, what defines us as individuals is not the misfortune itself, but how we overcome threats to develop traits of love, empathy, and resilience.” — Excerpt from Character Strength Development: Perspectives from Positive Psychology
Multiple studies on positive psychology and personality psychology confirm that adolescents represent the most vulnerable of populations when it comes to…
Working from home over the past year, I have been using the extra time to cook some new dishes. This venture has led to encounters with numerous food blogs, recipes, TikToks, Reels, and YouTube videos with interesting ideas for new concoctions and I’ve found that how well the recipe or the video is structured often predicts how chaotic or smooth the cooking experience will be. Even though most of the time the final result ends up good, the cleaning experience afterward isn’t nearly as homogenously good. …
It’s been a year since the pandemic truly became a ‘pandemic’. I never truly reflected on the year so far until I came across a post on Medium’s Instagram page with a writing prompt for reflective accounts of life during the pandemic.
Initially, I remember thinking about the pandemic as something that had to be “suffered” through for a bit, and then life would resume as normal. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. The mindset of my friends and family resonated with mine as well. …
Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information — for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands.
Unfortunately, as visual designers our medium of communication is two-dimensional. We must find ways to meaningfully incorporate multi-dimensional interactions and spatial relations in our designs to represent the real world multidimensionality accurately.
If the numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers.
Oftentimes, when representing data for the average reader, designers assume that the details are dull and tedious, requiring embellishment to seem appealing. What…
Since its humble beginnings in the 1960s, automation has grown like the Grecian monster Hydra — exponentially — pervading all aspects of our lives in both latent and explicit ways. Automation has been responsible for reducing labor costs, increasing efficiency, improving system safety, and increasing profits in commercial markets. The principal reason for the success of automation in all these areas has been its ability to reduce both mental and physical human workload. This makes it an attractive solution for situations where operators are subjected to time stress or are required to perform multiple concurrent tasks. …
On a road trip to Philadelphia last December, I volunteered to fill up the tank every time we stopped for gas. I wanted to practice doing it; where I am from in India, there are gas-station attendants who do the filling, so I wanted to get the hang of the US’s self-service system. At one such stop, I accidentally closed the fuel cap incorrectly, leaving the screw rings misaligned. It was bitterly cold outside, and I was in a hurry to get back into the warm car, which may have contributed to my oversight.
In any case, an error had…
Forgetting to disengage the parking brake. Not turning on the aircraft’s anti-icing system. Lining up the wrong runway to land on. Having to attempt a landing three times on a windy day.
These are just some of the in-flight errors logged by NASA’s safety reporting system in recent months. Experts and regulatory authorities have attributed these seemingly ‘silly’ errors made by the pilots to ‘being rusty’. As a result of an unprecedented fall in air travel, pilots have had fewer opportunities to fly.
To the everyday reader who comes across such articles, the incidents are amusing; comical even. That’s perfectly…
Anirudh Kedia
Aviation Geek | Grad student — writing to take a break from writing | Making Human Factors accessible one article at a time
